Amazing discussions happening down in the comments -- you all are definitely super nerds. This one was hard to make, but I really liked how it turned out. Also, give it up for Matter Beam, who is currently demonstrating exactly why I talk to them in the comments below. They should make a show! Thanks for watching, and here's the ultra-space-nerd website I mentioned at the end: www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ -- KH
Because Science My thoughts immediately after watching this video are about just how effective drone-carrier style war platforms would be, since it would externalize heat production from weapons fire & combat drone maneuvers. As long as the ship itself could vent heat from incoming fire as a primary focus, maybe even including emergency maneuvers such as a consumable heat dump (water or other heat absorbing agent used to absorb heat then dumped out an airlock/port)
As I watched this video, I had to wonder about space Mecha anime, valverave mentions heat saturation as the mechs main weakness, and majestic princes' large scale space battles seem accurate too. I would really like your opinion on the how realistic these shows are.
Thanks! ------------- mdavies97131 Due to inefficiences being multiplied from the reactor to the generator to the laser weapon, including all the power transmission and cooling losses in between, and then passing through energy losses with distance and at the laser/armor interface, the rule is that the heat you receive from the enemy will be small fraction of the heat they or you will have to deal with internally. For example, to heat you up by one megawatt, you can expect them to have to handle 10 megawatts of waste heat internally. Also, ablative armor is designed to absorb the laser energy and vaporize instead of conducting it into the spaceship. This is the same as ablative reentry heatshields: the Space Shuttle interior did not get hot despite the ceramic tile surfaces being eaten away at thousands of Kelvin. Heatsinks are useful for short bursts of power, but over even short periods of time, the mass of radiators that can handle the heat load becomes smaller than the mass of heatsink you need to handle the heat.
Because Science so could we use weapons that emit microwaves to heat up enemies from thousands of kilometers away?? Like literaly turning their space ships into a microwave~
This seems to justify the "Space Submarine War" concept to me. Your enemy is far away, you can't see them. You need to plan carefully but act quickly. Dodging is barely an option. And your biggest fear isn't the vessel exploding but a slow death. In a submarine, that's drowning. In space? Cooking. It's like the mirror of submarine battles, isn't it?
@@BonDieu617 It can be a variation of silent running - cool running. You retain all heat instead of radiating it out into space so that you remain undetectable, but risk the inside of your ship slowly rising in temperature once you no longer have heat sinks available. And then you can name a Jamaican bobsled team after it.
Without even watching this, I can guess what a space war would be like. "Nothings happening, I can't see anything... Nothings happening.... Hmmm" **Everyone dies instantly**
Well, if you detect them on your sensors than you can escape and not die! =D You still would probably never actually see the enemy or a single attack though.
That's quite like real war in a way - poor infantry getting ruined by artillery miles away, AFV's getting smashed by supersonic guided missiles that arrive before the sound of their engines, buried bombs at the roadside just deleting people driving back to base.
Yeah they are "pseudo lasers" just called lasers for the sake of simplicity for the general population of not just in real life but in lore as well. Its basically a deadly game of paintball. Its cheaper and more practical to create plasma bolt weapons than real laser systems in SW. However there are true laser weapons although they are expensive and require a lot of energy and space and usually always used for punching through heavy armor where you may have air superiority. Otherwise it takes too long for a laser to burn through armor which could just be blasted to pieces with a heavy plasma turret at a fraction of the cost and space
Yep. They also engage at close range beccause the star wars universe developed jammer to disturb the Aiming computers of the ships, forcing fleets to engage close (I think around the begging of the clone wars). Also do to gravity pullers your ship might get pulled unintentionally into a battle out of hyper space. Bigger ships are also that heavy Armored bombers are needed.
Yes, plasma is actual matter which has quite a bit of mass and takes quite a bit of energy to accelerate. However a direct impact would be super deadly
Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. bomber that is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth.That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law? Serviceman Burnside: Sir! An object in motion stays in motion, sir! Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot! Serviceman Burnside: Sir! Unless acted upon by an outside force, sir! Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction! You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!
Serviceman Chung is named after Winchell Chung, the main author of the website I plugged at the end of the episode! Seriously, that website is so good that Bioware used it when making the ME series, and added in his name as a special thank you easter egg -- KH
If you think about it, shouldn't Earth have been hit by all those stray shots during the final battle in ME 3? I'm surprised that Earth wasn't flat out destroyed after that.
Never let a little logic get in the way of a good space fight, though! (unless you're playing a hard sci-fi type game, then by all means call it out for it's BS).
+Brandon: Pretty sure all the stray shots were from small fighters or frigates, so they probably burn up in atmosphere. Large projectiles from dreadnoughts do not miss, as the gunners learned from Serviceman Chung to not eyeball it.
Radiation being the only way to lose heat is why I loved the Star Trek voyager episode where they explained that with power offline the ship gets HOTTER because there’s no way to get rid of excess heat quickly enough.
Very nice. I like that Voyager was sometimes the most scientifically accurate Trek so that they could create hardships and obstacles in their epic space camping expedition.
@@Thetravelingmonke i believe he was talking about the tv show, and as an aside, i noticed that in Strange New Worlds Memento Mori episode they basically do the same thing while in a space battle requiring them to disengage many subsystems (trying not to spoil Season 1, episode 4, since i think at least half of that first season is surprisingly good; worth watching).
There's also the issue that if somebody fired a laser at you, since it moves at light speed, you would never see it coming until it already hit you. If you live in the Star Wars or Star Trek universe, where faster-than-light travel is possible, you can use this to your advantage. You could come out of warp ten light minutes away from your target, fire a laser, then warp to some place nine light minutes from the target but at a different angle, fire another laser, and keep doing that until you have lasers firing at them from ten different directions, all timed to hit at the same time, and then you can warp away before the lasers hit, so you will be gone before the enemy even knows you were there, and they have no chance of firing back and don't even know what direction you came from or left in.
Hitting a target would also be harder because of the long distances. The time a laser needs to travel to your target becomes relevant to the point where you need to aim ahead and hope your target did not change direction.
Space junk sooo just like in an airplane battle or naval battle? I'm quite sure that we have the capability of calculating the lead needed. The trick would be silent scanning, accurate speed measurements and pretty amazing aiming systems. But that just means the continuation of naval warfare technology in space
Actually I think a more accurate analogy would be a submarine aiming its torpedos at an unsuspecting freighter same technological principle would still apply though.
Actualy in the Star Wars universe it can take d long time to jump to light speed because you have to plot a course that won’t let you hit anything and you wouldn’t be able to change without slowing down to normal speed
One of the best space combat novel series is "The Lost Fleet" by Jack Campbell. It explores a lot of realistic issues such as logistics, supply and repair, but one of the most interesting problems is relativistic sensor delay. Put simply, the enemy can't see you until your reflected light reaches them. So, if you're 90 light minutes, away, than they can't detect you at all for 90 minutes. You can see them, but your images are from 90 minutes ago. So all long range battles are fought with uncertainty of what the current actions and positions of the fleets will be.
Yes! And I also like that he talks about the speeds engagements happening at 1. Meaning that only computers can fire at the right time, you just try to set the ships up with pre set manoeuvres and 2. That moving so fast causes relativistic effects that makes targeting even more random. He also talks about how space stations are militarily pointless because you can just hurl rocks at them to destroy them as their path is completely predictable, but that also long ranged engagements are also pointless because of how much time you end up having to see the incoming projectile and change course to avoid it / intercept it with point defence weapons.
I'm glad this got mentioned. There is so much material on both the theoretical and fictional aspects of space battles from near term to far future aspects that an entire channel could be dedicated to the topic. I would definitely subscribe if that channel were to be recommended.
@@heresjonny666 The way he writes planetary invasions is also really cool. For one thing, all ground-based anti-ship weapons have to be buried and concealed, because if you just had big-ass railguns or missile silos sitting out in the open, the invading fleet could stay well out of their range and methodically pound them to dust. Same thing as with space stations, except worse because even stations can have some capability to dodge kinetic projectiles if they have enough advance warning, which happens several times in the books. And speaking of kinetic projectiles, it really does make sense for them to be the main and pretty much only weapon used in orbital bombardments. Nukes are expensive, complicated to build and maintain, and can potentially leave nasty nuclear fallout which isn't ideal if you're planning to keep the planet you just conquered. Kinetic projectiles, on the other hand, are literally just big ol' telephone poles made of solid metal, which when launched at relativistic speeds (a trivial thing in the Lost Fleet universe where ships routinely travel at up to 30% lightspeed) can easily hit as hard or even harder than nukes but without causing any nuclear fallout. They also don't need any warheads, sensors, maneuvering systems or engines, which not only makes them all but impossible to jam or shoot down unless you physically divert or vaporize them, but also means they can be manufactured directly on board your ships if you have the time and means to stop and strip-mine some nearby asteroids. And I also love that he points out how silly and impractical the concept of "space fighters" would be yet still finds some limited use for them in low-orbit or space-to-surface operations, like escorting shuttles filled with troops down through atmosphere where capital ships can't go due to being too large and unaerodynamic.
True 3D battles are hilarious. In Homeworld I used to warp my fleets into a tetrahedron array around enemy fleets to flank them in all three dimensions and confuse the hell out of them. Good times.
@@StarlitWitchy Somewhat older space opera RTS game. Pretty much the only one with entirely 3D ships in a full 3D battlespace. Homeworld 3 is finally in full production after quite a few years, so there may be a new one out soon - but the original was great. Tricky though. While the interface was very well designed, most folks find it difficult to adjust to fighting in real 3D, but they kept the economy part of the RTS simple to compensate.
@@Vastin The scenes and music reminded me a lot of the new BSG. I really enjoyed playing Homeworld. Had to replay half of it once I learned how to take over enemy ships properly.
@@Vastin There's a new game called Nebulous fleet command that's allegedly similar to homeworld in combat mechanics, but I've played neither so can't confirm it :p
Any proper spaceship has the potential for exterminatus level destruction. Just tow some sizable rocks and drop them down the gravity well, where they do weight something. Orks do it constantly
Something that he did not mention about cooling a ship, abet one that has its own drawbacks. Controlled ejection of a warm or hot gas or fluid carries heat away from the ship, acting in a similar manner to evaporation. Downside: the most likely gas to use is your breathable atmosphere, and the most likely fluid is water (which tends to accumulate anyway). Air tends to be hard to replace, especially when someone is trying to punch holes in your ship. These means that there are effective limits to how much you could cool a ship in space.
@@ericcao4829 I know it's 2 years, but... only by moving heat from hotter to cooler you can generate energy (thermodynamics). In space you could: - try to catch some (not 100%!) of radiated energy to make eg. electricity. Generally even if you cover whole ship hull with such "thing", you will get very minimal amount of energy. Something like photovoltaics pointed into the ship working on infrared light. - try to waste some energy to increase way more temperature in the radiator, so that you cool down due to radiating way faster. Effectively: heat pump. But probably radiators would need to be hundreds *C to be effective. In such case to be stealth you would need to transfer heat from one side of ship to the other and be heat-invisible only from some directions.
Ender's game does explain this. When Ender is training his troops in the battle rooms, he takes advantage of the "going forwards facing backwards" technique.
@@westcoaststacker569 The glorious Starfury! Engines mounted on x-wings with nozzles in both directions made for snap 180° turns without changing vector. *THE* best space superiority craft of the younger races (aside from the Minbari, anyway).
Correct. The engineered flaw was not the port itself, but the fact that it was large, straight, unshielded shaft directly to the station's main reactor.
The engineered flaw was that the reactor would blow up if it was hit while charging. Galen Erso didn't make the exhaust port that led to the reactor. That was just sloppy engineering that was fixed for the Death Star II.
@@Helios9826 That opening sentence is simply meant to invoke a sense of whimsical wonder like all fairy tales that use some variant of that phrase. But, even if we assume that it is meant to be taken literally, we still have no frame of reference for it. A "...long time ago..." relative to what? You could argue that since we are the audience, the opening phrase is made relative to our time/perception of time. But, there are plenty of stories where the opening narration gives no heed to the audience, and the audience is essentially a passive, third-party viewer.
"Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'til it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in 10,000 years! If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someones day! Somewhere and sometime! That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait 'til the computer gives you a damn firing solution." - "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!"
@@self-satisfiedsmirk5544 Id like to think that star wars are the lore of the milky way. An ancient precursor civilization that has been collapsed to a point where it is impossible to find relics from that age.
This is why I enjoyed Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Ships organized in fleets thousands of kilometers apart, forming battle lines and fleet formations, firing lasers at each other. They even got the thrusters right, having ones at the front of the ship for actual reverse thrust, as well as thrust on the top, bottom and sides of the ship.
I mean it still only makes little use of the 3D aspects besides huge walls of ships. But yes, it definitely gets things right in regards to distance, gruesomeness of space battles and other aspects (like how stealth technology would probably make most type of scanners almost obsolete and scouts are needed
@@alexanderzippel8809 Then what? Technology advances so well that the arms race between stealth tech and scanning tech has some mad lad just decide to go old school and get actual eyeballs on target to verify if there really is an enemy fleet and not just false positives on a screen? Then BAM, we’ve gone full circle and the age of the dreadnought returns.
experienced commander: we have better sensors and also built a ship that can handle the heat production of its assigned tasks. like any military with 5 braincells would do
2:30 Or, like gunnery chief in ME2 says: "Once you fire this hunch of metal it keeps going 'till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off in the deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years! [...] That's is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! [...] You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!"
While it's nice on paper and showing off that the creators know about physics, I don't think that in real battle anybody would care that the projectile _might_ impact with something in another system several thousand years in the future. The only thing you need to worry about is not hitting the friendlies.
It sounds truth-y, but fortunately it's very wrong. Some shell with roughly the energy of a nuke is: 1. Going to do little or nothing if it hits an uninhabited planet. 2. Very likely to escape the galaxy and never encounter another object of significant size (like a planet) before the heat death of the universe. 3. Probably most importantly, very likely to encounter a large piece of dust that shatters the round into a cloud of fragments. Space is not empty. Not even interstellar space. All realistic designs for interstellar spacecraft have some method off dealing with intercepting relativistic dust specks periodically, and it doesn't take much to turn even a large ship into a cloud of debris.objects traveling for months or years at relativistic speeds will be battered by collisions.
In the MMO Eve online, moving wasn't so much about "dodging" the laser beams themselves, but more about moving your ship faster than the tracking speed of the turrets targeting you, so they would miss or just wing you.
but then again that doesnt make any sense. imagine you had the strongest flashlight ever. and then you point it at the moon in a way that you see the beam (a far stretch i know). now you move your wrist very fast. now imagine the moon very far away. the distance between the moon and the flashlight determines the speed of the projection then (geometry). Now imagine how fast the moon would have to go around the earth so you cant follow it with your flashlight anymore. (also imagine the earth is a dot and/or you an shine a light through it). With this picture in mind, i dont see how a turret could move slowly enough to no capture a fly-by ship in kilometers of distance. it just has to move so little to cover so much distance.
@@Mohammed8778 Smaller class weapons like those mounted on frigate and destroyer class ships don't have that issue. Cruiser class ships (the next size up) can hit all but the fastest frigates and destroyers. From there it starts to get absurd because the ships and weapons get so much larger. Making turret tracking slower while a speedy frigate is still flying 3-6 km/second. That is unless the target is sufficiently away but still in range of your weapon. The smaller the orbit, the higher the "transversal velocity". Basically if you fly a small ship in support of a fleet against larger heavier hitting targets then you want to orbit close to avoid most of the damage. Until they deploy drones, which if you're not careful will catch and kill you. They don't hit real hard but enough little guys swarming you will bring down almost anything.
Except in real life it doesn't work as a good defense since it is much easier to move a turret a couple of degrees than it is to do course changes. The turret tracking speed is artificially induced in the game, in real life a computer assisted gimbal laser would be able to track you all day long with no problem. The only way you could dodge one is to sit in a dead zone which would probably be quite small.
There IS a point to maneuvering vs lasers though: lasers need to be focused on a single, small spot to do their damage. That ability to focus and track the target makes the difference between burning a hole in your hull and warming up a stripe of it. Violently changing direction would make it harder to keep the laser on target, and violently changing attitude would spread the incoming heat over a greater area of your ship's hull. Also, as you pointed out, laser are attenuated by rain or other particulate clouds. In the Traveller RPG, there's a weapon called a 'Sandcaster' that launches clouds of refractive particles in order to do just that. keeping clouds of 'sand' between yourself and a maneuvering enemy would be another reason to maneuver under laser fire. Speaking of sand, I think one factor which most sci-fi underplays or ignores is relative velocity. You don't need any sort of actual weapon to do horrendous damage, given the velocities which sci-fi ships are typically capable of: you just need to build up a huge velocity relative to the target, throw a barrel full of junk out of the front airlock, then change course. For a more formal weapon, make it a cloud of high-density ceramic (non-radar reflecting) balls an watch what they do to an enemy when they hit at 50,000 km/h. This is also a reason why elaborate 'city killer' weapons are pointless. You don't need to launch a nuke from a warship to kill a city, you just need to get a cargo ship travelling towards the planet at some horrendous relative velocity, then dump a hundred block of high-density material out of the hold.....
that is what i tought, if the laser takes seconds to melt the shield, you can just move to prevent the laser from hiting the same spot for a long time, you will only get scars
Get's hit with laser. "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick!" Actually works. Honestly, people saying "laser weapons" would be the best thing in space
It's a bit like the situation with missiles in armoured warfare. Back in the 1960s, many people were claiming that the new, high-tech scary anti-tank missiles spelled the end of the Main Battle Tank, and high-velocity anit-tank guns in general, in much the same way that aircraft carriers brought about the demise of the battleship. Yet, 50 years later, here we still are with MBTs and a whole host of smaller high-velocity anti-armour guns still in service. Why? Because, although the ATGWs brought SOME useful and effective capabilities to the table, and were definitely worth having, they also had some significant disadvantages and limitations and were vulnerable to various countermeasures too, which resulted in them becoming just "one more club in the golf-bag" instead of turning the whole of land warfare upside-down. There's a pattern to this in the history of warfare. The term "Jeune École" ("Young School") was coined in France in the 1890s to describe those younger naval officers who were convinced that the new-fangled torpedo spelled doom for the big-gun battleship. The "we know what the next big thing is and all these fuddy-duddy old generals/admirals are just getting in the way of progress" has cropped up again and again, but it's been proved wrong as often as it's been proved right. So yeah, killing lasers MAY have a role to play in future warfare, including space warfare, but you'd be a fool to write off the high-velocity projectile for a while yet...
Cheap, effective and reliable. Kinetics. But yeah, remember when long range, guided air-to-air missiles made "the gun obsolete"? So they stripped the gun off of their F4, went to war and when the missiles failed they had 0 back up and where screaming to get a gun somehow jury rigged onto the damn thing. That idea died quicker then it got thought up, operational reasons, tactical reality and the fog of war made BVR combat pretty rare even to this day, WITH our super advanced tech. Most air to air kills are still short range, not only because the enemy usually has shittier equipment that gets blown up while still on the ground anyway, but also because it is one thing to trust your sensor equipment that "that's a bad guy because his IFF didn't say friendly", but it's another to see the enemies flag on that bird and being like "YEP, that's an enemy alright, time to kill!" Heard a story from a UH-60 pilot who got buzzed by an F-16 in Iraq, bullets had taken out their radio and IFF system so nobody knew they where there and IFF couldn't respond...but he sees this F-16 spike on his RWR locking on to him. Apparently he found the pilot later and he said the only reason he came so close is because he wanted a guns kill, but then saw that it was a Blackhawk and called it in... Better to be sure than blue on blue because friendly fire, isn't.
honestly having a pretty sizeable ship with a powerful single burst laser is what you would use. getting most of the way into a plate of armor on a ship would do enough damage for the pressure difference to suck everything out of the ship like you sucking fluid up a straw. getting even a second of time is more then enough, and you wouldn't even SEE it coming until you where already on your way out of the ship. violently changing direction would also impose those forces on yourself and the ship it self. so spinning around like crazy isn't exactly the best idea. also heating up the ship's hull which would heat up the inside of the ship which would heat YOU up, is another way for you too die. so even if you spin around you will still die sooner or later xD.
I can see two ways space battle could develop- 1) Cheap, unmanned drone swarms piloted by a few small command ships to provide long-term direction. The drones would have an onboard AI, but the command ships could provide long-distance maneuvering calculations. These drones may utilize gravitational slingshots or pincer maneuvers to rapidly close the gap between them and an opponent as well as avoid targeting. 2) Large, shielded craft that can duck into the upper atmosphere to cool down while containing a lot of wide-range kinetic weaponry like nets, pellets or just junk ejectors to clutter an opponent’s orbit or path with dozens of what are essentially bombs. Additionally, lasers would be more likely used to redirect an opponent or make them burn fuel instead of simply heating or burning them. I think the absolute speed of objects in space will be the greatest utilized factor, because when something the size of a videogame controller made of super-cheap materials can impact with the force of dozens of explosive warheads, that tends to become very alluring to any prospective commander who needs cheap weaponry.
I honestly kind of think the 1st of the 2 theories is more accurate as the 2nd would need to utilize constant intelligence that, in times of war and with the difficulties of space, would be very hard to predict. It could work in conjunction with the first, being used as a defensive measure, but I don't think it would end up being a significant, key factor in terms of the entirety of space warfare. Defensive, definitely, but not offensive. If heat dissipation is the largest issue, I actually think we will use largely kinetic and/or torpedo like weapons as laser based weaponry causes much more heat on a per shot ratio. That all being said, I definitely agree with you on the absolute speed of objects being unchanged unless a force acts against it definitely being a determining factor in space warfare. I've always imagined there might be some conference in the future (if we ever get there) where we ban the use of solid projectiles being used against static(-ish) targets using the gravitational slingshot method we use nowadays. We know of ways to increase the speed of something *without* using any external force besides that of nearby terrestrial objects, so I've always imagined we'd utilize this and use something similar to the 'rods of god' and a much, much more advanced relay system. Still, that runs into the issue of constant intelligence like your 2nd theory. That's why I think your 1st theory holds the most merit overall, imo, and holds the most plausibility. One theory of mine I've always speculated came after watching the show The Expanse. If we have the ability to calculate the trajectory and likely route of the target in the orbit of a celestial object, then we'd have a pretty good idea of where it *might* be if it hadn't made another maneuver since the first trajectory estimation. In this aspect I think it kind of resembles something like WW2 Uboat warfare, with a larger emphasis on evasive maneuvers, heat management, and most importantly intelligence/stealth. Gas giants would be utilized to great effect, and so would be the natural gravitational force of terrestrial bodies. If heat management is key factor in space warfare, I don't see the need to utilize any other weapons besides purely kinetic. Though I *can* see sticking an explosive warhead on it for good measure, but the relative speed at which it would be traveling and the force it would hit its target with wouldn't make any difference given how fast an object can go after even a part-way slingshot maneuver. Anyways, sorry for the word murder. TLDR your 1st theory is extremely plausible and something I very much think will come to pass. The 2nd theory is too static and therefore good in a defensive manner but the same principles can still be exploited in a more offensive way.
Why are we assuming that the two competing ships have vastly differing velocities? Projectiles become ineffective if your opponent matches your speed and direction.
@@_shadownotes_ Well keep in mind velocity is relative in space. Just because you and your target are going at the same speed in the same direction doesn't mean your projectile won't do anything. The projectile itself, if you account for where the target is going, will use the velocity it already has when fired/launched and THAT is what determines the force of impact (assuming its solid). It would only do no affect whatsoever in a chase-type scenario where the projectile is chasing the target, but even then the projectile will most likely be going faster than the target itself as the relative mass is much lower and thus easier to move/increase velocity of on a projectile than an entire ship. Especially as we can increase the velocity of something using external forces like gravity. So at that point the entire game of Space Warfare is trying to find out where your enemy is, keeping your position hidden, and trying to determine their route so you can land a shot. Plus, ofc, all the points brought up in this video.
@ZestyBullet Every scenario would be a "chase" scenario, otherwise the ships would eventually drift apart, which is my point. Sure, you can speed up a projectile, but it's going to take resources. Not to mention you can employ interception projectiles.
Doctor Cthuluhu, Insert Meme: Nukes won't be effective in space. There is no air to transmit and deliver a shockwave of pressure to their target. Instead, they will just flash like very, very bright X-ray lightbulbs. These X-rays disperse in all directions, so staying even a moderate distance from megaton bombs (10-100km) renders them harmless. If you are going to deliver a nuclear warhead across thousands of kilometers to just on top of the target, might as well take the extra step and slam it into the target for a guaranteed kinetic kill.
Matter Beam the hard radiation is still very useful in space. Russia, France, and the US all have enhanced radiation bombs, distinctly for use outside the atmosphere. The nukes hard radiation and EM pulse is meant to blind satellites and ground based sensors for hundreds of kilometres. NATO’s old declassified battle plan was for an exo-atmospheric detonation just to the east of Finland. That would blind/disable Soviet sensors for hundreds of kilometres, allowing the rest of the nukes to get through easily. Using a nuke to splash a target with hard radiation would be very useful in a space battle, and would require tons of shielding on the target craft to mitigate. Yes, the blast wave is only transferable if it’s detonated on/inside the target, but as long as you were far enough away the hard radiation would only be a tiny amount for you. While bathing the target in everything from infrared to x-rays. One of the plans Nasa had considered in the 1960-70s was re-purposing a large nuke to deflect an incoming asteroid, as long as they had years in advanced warning. They would detonate it nearby and the radiation would push it just slightly off course, but still far enough that in a few years it would equal kilometres of change.
I was in the US Navy for ten years , my rating was Operations Specialist . That's basically a radar operator , but with more duties . Space war would be like modern submarine warfare with some differences . Space operations would be nothing like modern air to air combat . There are no need for windows underwater or in space , sensors do what human eyesight cannot . If you need to see something , cameras and periscopes fill the bill . No need for panes of transparent material , they would just be weak points in the ships hull . Communications would not be instantaneous like shown in movies , it would take minutes between sending a message and the recipient receiving the message , then more time for the receiver to write then send a reply . It would be like two ship captains texting each other with a bad connection . Today , signals are detected by specialists and their content is sent to those who need to know , and I think that's how comms and signal analysis would be handled . There would be no need for space fighter planes , drones , torpedoes , and mines would fill that duty . Imagine R2D2 flying the X-Wing without a person in the cockpit , Luke is sitting in a combat control console on the drone carrier . I could go on about how different modern naval operations are from what people think , and how different I think space operations would be like . And that's just considering ops within our solar system .
Aldrick Samano. By "tag" do you mean strike , or identify ? Yes , they should be able to do both . A modern torpedo is basically an underwater drone , controlled by the sonar operators on the ship , submarine , or aircraft that launches it . Some types of torpedoes are wire guided for a distance , once the wire runs out they change to self homing mode . Some missiles are guided to the target by the vessel that launches them for the entire flight , some are guided part of the way then go into a targeting mode on their own . A drone doesn't need life support systems necessary for a manned craft . That saves a lot of weight and expence , making drones lighter and less expensive . That also means that drones could be disposable . All the fuel that isn't used to bring a manned vessel back safely could be used to double the range of a one way unmanned weapon . A space weapon could be designed that uses both active control and self targeting modes . That's just my conjecture .
Victor Waddell I agree with most of what you are saying but the time delay of communication could be a factor for drones. Instead of having direct control you would only be able to give orders which programs or AI’s would have to carry out
@@spencerwilliams3903 Like how cruise missiles are programmed with a "mission package" before they are launched , a drone could be programmed to attack a specific target . These types of weapons are often called " fire and forget " . If the launching platform is not in control of the drone , it can perform it's mission autonomously . Drones could also be laid like mines , waiting in ambush , their data banks loaded with specific targeting information and parameters for attack . This would allow defending fleets to plant " space minefields " of a sort . These mines could also act as advanced pickets , using their sensors to detect and report to the fleet any activity before the manned vessels detected the attackers . Some modern navies use what are called sonobuoys , These are disposable floating sonar devices that are dropped into the water , usually by aircraft . They send targeting and identification to aircraft and ships via a radio or electronic data link . Once their batteries run out they sink to the bottom . In space a similar type of sensor could be used to extend the range of a fleet's sensors . They need not be disposable if they were made with a system of recharging via solar power or had compact nuclear energy plants . It would still take several minutes for their signal to travel , though . Imagine , a spacebuoy detects an enemy , orders the minedrones to attack , the spacebuoy assesses the results of the attack then sends a signal to the Flagship . It might take longer for the message to get to the Admiral than the batle took to occur . That's a similar type of battle to carrier engagements in the WW2 Pacific Ocean campaign . The capital ships rarely saw each other . The carriers in both fleets used manned aircraft at ranges far longer than the battleships ever fired at each other . I imagine drones taking the place of Kamikaze pilots and drone carriers/minelayers being the capital ships of the space fleets .
I don't think you realized that the main weapons platforms on star wars ships shoot charged beams of plasma, that is why they need tibanna gas for their blasters.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot did a good job with showing a turn with thrusters more like you described. They didn’t always stick to those physics because rule of cool, but there was a higher than average effort.
Human ships in Babylon 5 also were more scientifically accurate. Alien ships did not follow these rules because they had alien propulsion technology and artificial gravity.
Shoutout to the original Mass Effect trilogy for mentioning most of these things even though they then went for a more cinematic depiction of the battles whenever there was a cutscene. I loved the conversation you could overhear on the citadel of a sargent giving two soldiers a speech on how you don't fire a weapon in space unless you know it's going to hit, because if it misses the bullet is going to continue on until eventually it hits something else that might be important.
You know, weaponizing your own hear production might be an interesting idea. Imagine firing lasers at enemy, and then umsiphoning the excess heat to help generate plasma that is sealed within shells, that are then fired out of rail guns. Turn your own heat into a weapon to be used against your enemy.
use conduction to make a super hot projectile that you then fire at the enemy. the item would then transfer the heat from your ship the the enemy's ship.
@@corbsshas2811 consider: thermal conduction only works to equalize the temperatures between two items. Projectiles heated by your heatsinks or hull will only ever be as hot as the source in question, which will always be below meltdown temperatures. You're better off using heat pumps for something like that, but even then heatpumps are not at all efficient here.
@@iceball3xd Heat pumps are stupidly efficient! Not really able to reach plasma temperatures afaik, but honestly this is useful more just as a means of dumping heat from your craft more quickly than radiators could provide. I'm picturing having heat sink piping laced under/into the ships armor that draws heat away from where you got hit and dumps it into projectiles or into the ships reaction mass to preheat it before the engine does the rest of the heating prior to expelling it for thrust. Dumping heat into mass via conduction and then tossing that mass overboard will always be way faster than just relying on radiators alone. Might not help with actually damaging the enemy much though since with modern heat pump technology we're only talking about raising the temp of the object by maybe a few hundred degrees
One idea to loose heat in a space war (or generally for spaceship) would be to conduct all your heat in some kind of mass (say a huge slug of steel or copper) and then just throw it out of your spaceship. If you're lucky, it's going to hit something. The main problem here being that you would loose mass everytime you do that, so it's something that would need to be extremely carefully planned.
Maybe the heat could be directed to those slugs, and there’d be *lots* of them, so that battles can last longer? The radiator foils or whatever would be reserved for calmer periods, and the slugs would be used when overheating is an actual problem
Or have some kind of conductive "vein" system to direct heat in a way you could convert it into energy, and then blast that energy at your enemy via a laser
True, but once you get out of the sphere of influence of a planet the forces become quite small for purposes of combat. Ground to space weapons (which already exist, China is known to have them) can be quite effective, simply launch on a ballistic trajectory and you've instantly got a ~15,000mph speed difference to your target. Another factor is that a space battle would very rapidly initiate Kessler syndrome in the orbit of the battle.
Joel V once you get out of the sphere of iinfluence of the planet you are still in the sphere of influence of the host star. To get out of our solar system for example you need the third escape velocity otherwise you are trapped in an orbit around the sun. Even if you manage to do that you are still in an orbit around our galactic core, the escape velocity for that is around 594 km/s. So in space you are in an orbit most of the time and most likely never fly in a straight line.
thechecker111 Technically in the video, he was saying that it would theoretically keep moving indefinitely only if hypothetically there was nothing in or near its path. But I still agree with what you're saying because in space there is almost always something in/near your path.
You really don't. Depending on how fast you are going relative to the object dominating your orbit, your trajectory may well be fairly straight, and on the relatively small scale of a battle space, thinking in non-orbital terms is a perfectly valid approximation.
as long as you are in the same orbit as the target, its is enough, if all planets have the same orbit around the galaxy the laser will not hit any of them because of the galaxy's gravity
The Starfury in Babylon 5 (the show as a whole in a lot of cases) is a great example of a space fighter. They have engines that point in multiple directions to arrest their momentum in space and can turn on a dime.
The only thing that disappointed me about the Star Fury was that its guns were fixed. Seems to me that if they had even a 45 degree firing arc that the pilot could focus on getting their plane pointed the right way and let the combat computer make the fine adjustments for the shot. Other than that though, they're fantastic.
I seem to remember Babylon 5 fighters using thrusters to reorient themselves to shoot, and also slow down or change direction. The Expanse still has sound in space battles, (from the outside) but space battles without 'pew pew pew' would be very boring, so, artistic license
YES! They even had that one training scene where a rookie was pursuing Ivanova, and she just turns around and returns fire (non-damaging low-power shots both ways). There's also that scene where one Destroyer (the Pollux???) fires at "nothing" -- followed by return fire coming in from same "nothing" and da,maging the Destroyer. Then we switch PoV and see that she dealt some damage to a White Star, which loses thrust and drifts right into the Destroyer, resulting in a mutual kill. One of the few scenes which treat engagement ranges realistically. Even B5 zigzags that matter a lot. There's also the Interceptor Launcher, a weapon which usually is seen deploying defensive missiles (designed to crash into incoming ordnance rather than striking back at the enemy). A necessity, since not only stations like B5, but also capital ships don't evade well -- even less so since most capital ships use guided torpedo or missile weapons, which could mimic the target's maneuvers. There' are also some rather slow and unguided weapons. Not sure why, maybe they use less energy or are more damaging???
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 Ah, the problem with turning around to shoot the guy chasing you in a dog fight is that the guy turning around usually STOPS MANEUVERING to do it. If Ivanova had been sparring with an experienced pilot during that maneuver, he would have shot and hit her first before she finished turning around because he already had guns pointed at her and she didn't. In space, not accelerating and being on a predictable ballistic free fall is as good as standing still and holding up a "SHOOT ME" sign. Arguably, Battlestar Galactica did this kind of thing better. When Starbuck turns around to shoot the Raider chasing her, she's STILL MANEUVERING even if only with RCS thrusters. We can see Viper and Raider wobbling back and forth as they're shooting at each other AT THE SAME TIME.
@@noppornwongrassamee8941 Depends on the tech level. If shields are a thing, you're turning your fresh shields towards the enemy and can take another few hits. So, it would be a good idea at Star Trek / Wars, and it would make a difference in cases where the participants have significant armor, too. So B5 would count, but only with capital ships rather than fighters.
It's actually "stuff". Nobody knows what is it, exactly, because it is not a laser, for obvious reasons, but it's not plasma either, because it have significant mass (it carries quite a punch judging by the results of hits on characters and ships) and it doesn't dissipates in space like plasma would.
Captain: Fire the photon topedos Engineer: I can't do it Captain we'll burn up Captain: Doctor how much heat can we take before we melt Doctor: Dammit Captain I'm a Doctor not an Engineer!!! :-)
Captain: Engineer? Engineer: I'm an engineer not a damn physicist! Captain: ... We should've brought someone smarter with us. Science Officer: Well, the melting point of the tachyon tachyon tachyon tachyons is equivalent to the melting point of tachyons. However, we are about to melt ourselves before then and I wasted time explaining this all to you and now we are dying. Captain: Did anyone who knew who space worked ever proof-read this script?! Science Officer: Obviously not, sir, they didn't even spell "how", correctly.
Photon torpedoes are actually antimatter torpedoes, they give off light when the antimatter and matter is in the same chamber but kept apart by an electromagnetic field, thus mixing but not exploding. A photon is a fancy name for light.
Really would love to see overheating be used as explanation as to why an ancient derelict ship became derelict. Like, instead of Star Trek next gen crew finding mummified corpses in an ancient alien battleship from a forgotten war, they’d find burnt corpses, seemingly baked as the ship overheated and everybody inside was suddenly inside an oven. Terrifying!
The Expanse only really does CQB around important locations. Missiles and torpedoes are used at a distance quite often. It's actually quite hard to notice how far away the ships are.
@@westcoaststacker569 Man, that stealth asteroid plot hurt my brain. It was so obvious what was gonna happen, in fact it actually had already happened with Eros, yet everyone went collectively retarded just for the sake of the plot. It was in my opinion the absolute worst part of the show, writing-wise. That and Ashford surrendering, knowing full well he was gonna die, when he had a gun on Inaros and could've taken him out, going out in a blaze like a Belter should.
So if you want to make a realistic space fight scene, you have to treat it like a sniper vs counter sniper fight scene with multiple snipers on both sides (if it is a fleet on fleet battle)...
To experience THE BEST portrayal of space battles read the Lost Fleet series of books by Jack Campbell. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy and even takes into account the fact that after jumping into a system you would be seeing how things are hours ago, not as they are. Great read.
Honor Harrington (once the author gets over his navel hang ups, he tried to translate Napoleonic combat to 3d for the first few books before giving up and advancing the tech to make sense) is pretty great as well. Time lag and approach vectors factor a lot. Also a classic is the Forever War, that features a couple space battles that are basically luck and RNG's. Also .95 c ramming of a planet.
Unless the fight is near a planet and the enemy is trying to land on said planet. Otherwise. Distance would be king and so would be accurately fast communication to differentiate friend or foe. Space is huge yes, but engagements might be somewhat close due to said friend or foe differentiation.
Your comment should be on top. There are certain points of interest where fleets or ships would meet each other. different orbits around a planet would dictate distances and engagement sectors, from the point where the curvature of a planet would no longer prevent both opponents from being "seen". Stations or asteroid fields would close the distances even more. Still "space distances", but not as vast as one might possibly think at first.
Depends on how different the enemies are, technology-wise. A spectral analysis of the heat signature might give you all the clues you need, and you can afford staying several light seconds away, and launch your laser in advance, just like a torpedo, to intersect the enemies glide path. he won´t dodge, because he can´t see it coming.
Unless you get some intel about some ships en-route to some destination. Set up an ambush of stealth ships (probably unmanned weapon platforms?) and take them all out within about 60 seconds before they even get rail guns charged up to fire back.
@@paavobergmann4920 Personally I think it all comes down to dominion. Who has surveillance of what? And as midetydeath has stated it all becomes a game of logistics. Sure distance for weaponry is mostly no longer a problem. Now the question becomes how far can we surveillance, and how far away are our ships from the surveying? It also becomes a game of how many defense lasers for a planet or base we have vs how many ships they have. It would also be practical to lay our ships just outside the enemies surveillance, but still near the edge of our own dominion. That way in case an enemy *tries* to invade a planet or system, we can intercept them at a relatively short notice. This also doesn't take in account of things like Warp Jumps, where a ship or fleets for that matter can just jump from system to system at will.
I remember in Star Wars Battlefront:Elite squadron(detailed so people can easily find it). When you do the Death Star run. It showed that when you hit the breaks, the thrusters on an X Wing actually have vents on the back pointing towards the front of the ship. And it appeared to have slowed your X Wing down when the vents were opened. Since then I thought that’s how breaking worked
This makes me wonder if Spess war would be a lot like a game of Battleship, each enemy trying their best to pinpoint their enemies and hiding themselves before moving first
@@RamdomView They did, but Bioware specifically said they didn't follow the codex for the battles scenes in Mass Effect 3 to make them look better visually. It was an artistic choice.
@@dannichols5010 I believe you. On BioWare's part, that sounds like a cop out. It is entirely possible to create a suspenseful and dramatic scene without deviating from the codex. There's a scene in Star Trek where a rogue (?) ship attacks Cardassian ships and all we see is a sensor screen that Data narrates. It is a good scene. Or, try playing Homeworld on sensor mode only, and you'll still feel suspense, wondering and worried about the welfare of your crews. If anything, it would have been more artistic for BioWare to attempt to follow their own material instead of imitating other visual SF.
You know in many movies they show that the space ships are going from light speed to zero in just a split second then shouldn't every person in the ship be dead and turned into a mush of flesh and bone .what modifications they should do to prevent this from happening.?
Or one more thing, what would the stresses be on a ship that approaches light speed at different points along the ship. Like in shows where the front part seems to spaghettify before the back, how would you even calculate the material stress? Do we have a way to deal with this already?
Inertia dampeners from Star Trek. But that's just standard motion. For warp/light speed, it's the warp bubble that creates a pocket that allows the ship to move "around" space...not through it.
that depends i guess in Trek they are moving the space around them not themselves . in wars and other jumping to lightspeed then yeah probably. i think they would need some sort of inertial dampeners or something.
I love how he drew an Apocalypse, an Abbadon, (maybe?) a Tornado and what seems like an Augoror in the thumbnail! really nice easter egg about EVE Online 😁
So that's why TIE Fighters are such fast, effective fighters, they've got giant radiator panels dedicated to dispersing heat more efficiently than X-Wings, allowing them to redirect more energy to actual propulsion instead of heat management!
It depends on what version of the canon you're talking about. Star Wars is hardly consistent on the matter. I think a similar explanation is used for X-Wings. They have to spread their s-foils out to attack so that they have a greater surface area from which to radiate heat.
Let's just assume that the TIE fighters don't use solar panels, because that would be the stupidest design ever. They increase the target size by like 4x, making them easier to hit, for what? The kinds of things that a spaceship does - propulsion, maneuvering, computing, and firing frickin lasers - would require *orders of magnitude* more energy than a solar panel could generate. It would be practically pointless to use them since you would be running almost entirely on your Super Ion Space Battery(TM). And that is even giving the generous assumption that they are near a star like our Sun. Space is almost completely empty and If you were to chose any random point in space, there's a very very low chance that it will be anywhere near a star. And we rarely see a Star Wars battle happen near a star. Those panels would be generating enough to maybe power one diode on your control board. So yes, those panels would be much much better as radiators. Let's call them that.
Death Trooper DT-101 You could probably just infect one of them with a lethal disease and since they are all the same the would probably all get sick and die.
Nimmy Jewtron, Good point, I never thought about that, engineer a virus that only targets the genome of the template of your enemy’s clone army, problem solved!
When he mentioned using space in 2D, I remembered Star Trek II: Spock (re Khan): "He's intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates....2 dimensional thinking." Kirk: "Z minus 10,000 meters, stand by photon torpedoes.) Of course, you have to realize that a space battle on film -- like a sword fight on film -- is there to tell the story to the audience, not to be accurate to real life.
Yeah, wasn't that like the big coup de grace, the fact that the Enterprise *gasp* came from BELOW the other ship? That shouldn't have been a brilliant strategy, that should have been standard combat.
ABout the heat problem, if you specifically are on a warship you could put your whole crew on light insulated spacesuits with cooling systems so that you spaceship could grow hotter before you have to surrender...
Space Battle 101: Step 1) Everyone get into a space suit, you don't want to get blasted into space, through a hole, into space without one. Step 2) Depressurize the ship. You don't want your ship to pop like a balloon the first time you get a hull puncture. Step 2a) This helps to prevent getting blasted into space. Step 3) And for God's sake, be strapped to something!!! A seat, a wall, something so that you don't "pinball" around inside the room you are in.
...Chaff..? Chaff, originally called Window by the British and Düppel by the Second World War era German Luftwaffe (from the Berlin suburb where it was first developed), is a radar countermeasure in which aircraft or other targets spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminium, metallized glass fibre or plastic, which either ...
Why only panels? Wouldn't it be simply just a very good idea to polish the surface of your hull? Warfare Spaceships could be designed like the "Mercedes Silberpfeile", because polished aluminium can have a very high reflectivity (normally > 85% in a wide range of wavelength)
A mirrored surface would be the best most sustainable defense but if they can maintain a shot on you for even a few seconds the leftover energy of what didn’t reflect would build up enough to not only damage your ship but cause the targeted area to turn to plasma and that rapid expansion would blow open your ship so you either have to have layers of backup so it only blows a hole in the outer layer or get used to space and no air and being sucked through the hole with lots of deadly debry
Also could have backup water system that can in desperate times be used to put some water between you and the attack which like the rain would protect you but you really don’t want to have to use water, And if they have a rail gun? You need some good counter measures something like anti misile misfiles only this is like trying to spot a bullet with a bullet so you’d need, -a really fast computer with access to a strong telescope so it can use only nanoseconds to calculate (and that’s if it’s farrrr) -a railguns of your own with a bigger round that can hit and have enough momentum to direct the shrapnel away from you -and luck lots and lots of luck Another thing that wouldn’t really be an issue in ship battles but bad for planets and stations is weaponised space debri If you attached rockets to a car sized rock and launched it at a space station they can’t stop it not entirely even if they blow it up the remains will tear through it, and on a planet? Add all that weight and gravity you get a massive area of destruction, from a car? A 1 mile crater with of course that only being the edge of the crator wall so an area probably closer to 3 miles around would be near certain death and dangerous at least up to 10 miles and if it causes any sizmic movement it could be dangerous even further depending on what it set off natural disasters could be caused 100’s of miles away, and that just from something the size of a car. So basically space war is pretty impractical in ships mostly, but in weaponized asteroids it’s the most terrifying thing we’ve ever created as a byproduct of science even worse depending on the size of the object than nukes.
The Halo books do a great job at showing how crazy long range space battles would be. Enemy ships hundreds of thousands of kilometers away firing different kinds of weapons at each other and the insane calculations needed to make that happen.
The Forever War did a pretty good job with realism in a space war. That book is ok but if you want to read an amazing book about sci-fi warfare it has to be Ender's Game. It is not decidedly unrealistic, but I wouldn't call it hard science fiction either. Definitely the best book I have ever read
One of my favorite examples of a space battle is the one in book 6 of the Expanse where the enemy ship has to speed up on an elliptical trajectory in order to reach the rocinante before it reaches the ring, and because of the massive relative velocity between the two ships, the whole battle happens in like a second and is over before the pov character even understands what happened
Great series... And we "almost" have all the tech required to do it. BUT, we just don't have the manufacturing TO do it. Except for the Anderson Drive, we will need that before we can do any of the other stuff.
@@DivineInt If I remember space above and beyond, i think the marine fighters fought more like planes, but i could be remembering wrong, it has been a looonggg time. LOL..
Isn't the first season of "The Expanse" centered around some sort of space stealth technology? That's about as naive as dogfighting and explosions in space when you think about it.
I always thought that admiral Akbar was so good at commanding space ships, because he came from an aqueous planet. His attention and tactics were honed over his many years living in an environment where all dimensions had to be taken into account at all times! Not like us land lubers..who mainly see threats as in front or behind
I always looked at starships as being very similar to submerged submarines. You're in a closed environment, and are totally dependent on sensor data, life support, and structural integrity for survival. Any of those 3 key systems fail, you're dead. Out of all the current military, a submarine crew would probably make the best starship crew.
McCall G. I always thought about that! Something I really started thinking about in star wars after episode 7 when there was that ackbar look alike, it might of been a diff movie. Was how maybe certain species are probably batter for certain roles, and which species usually filled them
The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand have these mechanics in the books. Heat sinks on the ships to manage heat etc. Battles are vastly far apart. Its a great story.
Greetings. Most authors write about what they know, and then just vary the story a bit to fit the target audience. Heinlein just wanted to write about grunts in world war 2. Herbert wanted to write an epic sailing/trade story about the history of some high demand commodity (like spices or oil). From a scientific perspective, Herbert has several big problems. First - in the future everything will be automated by computers but he didn't know anything about them. Second, space battles are the arena that decide the war, not the surface of a planet. Nobody just has trade guilds - they have warships too that allow the trade ships to function at all. Third, the spice is just nonsense - you name it, and it does it (and the most probable commodity of the future is information). Fourth, the ecology of Dune doesn't work. It's mostly just sand mysteriously supporting giant animals - what are they eating? Rocks? Fifth - why are the people in the Dune solar system not mining water in their outer solar system (planets or comets) and slowly filling Arrakis with water? Without that there is no way they are going to magically change the ecology of the planet.
I know the reasoning, but I do have some counterpoints. For one, Heinlein didn't intend an allegory for WW2 particularly, more just war in general; (He served as a Navyman before the war broke out but was discharged on medical leave. Think of Full Metal Jacket, despite being set during it, it wasn't exactly a Vietnam story was it?) and Frank's story was more particularly about the ecology and politics, the trading (in the form of CHOAM) really played very little part in it past being a monopolistic force along with the Spacing Guild that the other factions battled and maneuvered to control. I hate to imply you don't know much about Dune, but all of the things you described are explained quite easily and well by the setting and things you discover in the later books, or are an over-exaggeration in the case of The Spice. The Spice has a few principle properties: It tastes slightly different for everyone sort of like cilantro but more generally like cinnamon, it has a "geriatric effect" extending the life of long-time users, not unlike the common ideas of so-called miracle drugs in science fiction at the time; it can be made into a material similar to plastics like many real-life plants, (see pith helmet) and lastly it has the admittedly science fantasy attribute of unlocking "the full potential" of the human mind. The potential effects of which are improving Mentats' computation ability, (which they have from breeding, training, and other drugs) allowing someone who can survive an immense overdose of it to interact with racial memories, and someone who's been immersed in it to the point that it alters their physiology can see brief glimpses into the future, with total future-sight being only attainable to the product of tens of thousands of generations of eugenics to create a man who can survive "The Spice Agony" as it's called, successfully receive Mentat training, and is otherwise vastly improved of the general stock of the human race. I could explain your other problems, but It'd probably be easier to read the books rather than my walls of text at that point, ha.
Fun stuff guys. BUT! >8^): _-The Guild had no interest in allowing Arrakis to be gardened, that would be fatal to them. It's the ONLY source of spice, and the organisms that create spice hate water. IOW, the Guild would PREVENT any importation of water from elsewhere in the system. And, IIRC, they had a complete monopoly on space travel, not just intersteller but also interplanetary. (Original 4 books only.) Fun! As for Starship Troopers: I think Heinlein was focused in the narrative solely on INFANTRY. I mean, some ships got killed, but it was not the focus of the book.
in an event of a space confrontation like star wars where the figthers are blown up, wouldn't the shrapnel from the explosion make any spaceship at a medium radius, say 500m - 1km, at risk from being hit by this speeding shrapnel, so much so that a chain reaction of ships blowing up can be caused?
Yes. That's true. Such "shrapnel" is why we're on the verge of cutting ourselves off from space. It's all of the bits and pieces from ships/cargo vessels/etc we've put into space. Neil Tyson goes into this several times. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5Ronbf-r8DU.html
Quite right. Shrapnel will escape the exploding spaceship at 0.3 to 3km/s. It will be like shooting bullets at everything around the exploding spaceship.
Tommy DoeZ!!! One must keep in mind that "medium" range in space combat may be many thousands of kilometers. The mass of the exploded ship will be diffusing into a huge volume of space. Even flying directly through the point where the enemy vessel detonated, the odds of striking any debris would be very small.
No. The shrapnel would go fast in absolute speed - but not in speed relative to the ship (assuming the 2 ships firing at each other had relatively similar orbits). The shrapnel would thus easily be blocked by the hull.
The most economical way to have space battles: Just have unmanned space probes hang around in space, when a threat appears command them to ram into said threat. The first side to run out of probes have to surrender because orbital strikes are simply OP
No, not a mine field. In space you don't need missile silos to house your missiles or kinetic propulsion weapons. It could in theory have an effective range covering the solar system
I get what you mean, you would of course need a type of IFF to prevent friendly fire. To be efficient cost wise perhaps a way of 3D printing replacements at an orbital supply/HQ depot would be best rather than replace by sending up more from the surface?
The problem is signal times, which makes drones much less usefull for remote engagements. This means that such crafts needs to be autonomious. This in turn means you need targeting in the system, IFF, sensors, electronic shielding and so on. There are tons of problems with this, and considering that those components are lost upon ramming attacks and the efficiency of point defense it might not at all be the most economical solution. That said, it is still very likely that space combat will be dominated by unmmanned vessels, since you can allow such vessels to experiance much higher accelerations during combat (and the cross section of a dumb line ordinance is proportional to deltaT/a^4 and deltaT/a^6 for dumb point, where deltaT is the time to hit the target from the time the signal traced with originated from the target, while a is the acceleration).
i remember in Indie War2, they had this inside the game, the game was interesting, because it involved heat management and reducing heat signature for some missions there was an elejctable heat dumb box,
something that bothers me about star wars: if jets and spacecrafts can travel in light speed, why doesn't the empire develop nukes that can travel in light speed? news like that should help you control the galaxy in the matter of days... and its more cost-effective than building a moon...
You don't even need nukes. Just a big lump of inert mass. Attach light speed engines to an asteroid and send it flying into its target and the end result is an impact of planet-killing magnitude. You wouldn't even need a large asteroid to literally vaporize a planet if you got it to light speed. And considering that apparently an X-wing sized craft can jump to light speed, it would be insanely cheaper than a death star, and practically imposible to stop by anyone.
@@ObakeOnna Actually, X-Wings are unique in that regard. The only comparable ship of the time, the TIE fighter, had no hyperspace functionality - it was tied to its mothership. This is because they were produced cheaply and used for quantity over quality. The Rebellion, however, had limited resources to spend, especially in the human element, so rather than build many disposable craft, they instead invested significantly more capital into each X-Wing, creating fighters much more capable than their TIE opponents. In addition, the Rebellion favoured hit-and-run tactics, which are made far easier by the simple fact that even their fighter craft could independently jump to hyperspace to escape pursuit.
Because they travel in an alternate dimension iirc, so it wouldn't interact with our dimension. But you still could teleport a nuke into the enemy ship, so... Also I'm disregarding TLJ, as it shit all over the canon lore
Good stuff. Heat is one of the reasons I think we'll see projectile weapons on military craft for centuries to come. Unless we make some huge leap in heat-saving technology. Just the same, I have always interpreted the weapons in Star Wars as something more like bolts of magnetically constricted plasma or something. They're certainly not laser beams.
Blaster are confirmed plasma based weaponry in SW... even Turbo Laser on sips are plasma based even if the name is misleading... They use special gasses that have properties that allow plasma to hold shape over larger distances... with turbo lasers they usesd lasers to charge this gas or something like that I can't remember...
Projectiles are nearly useless in space. At those distances targeting becomes useless. You just need to change your speed and direction by very tiny amounts every couple of seconds. Hitting you now with a projectile that takes 30 or 60 seconds to travel the distance is hopeless. The other issue is recoil. On a planet, you can use the ground to anchor you, but in space, every shot will also push the shooter. The same amount of kinetic energy the bullet delivers to the target, it also delivers to the gun. Sure, the gun has better ways to distribute the impact than a random piece of hull, but it still severely limits the size of your guns. This actually is a good thing as any projectile that misses its target travels on and will potentially hit some other ship, maybe hundreds of years in the future with the exact same energy it would have hit its target with. No, the practical space weapon is the torpedo. It has next to no recoil, a much longer range, can track its target and finally deliver an explosion and not just kinetic energy. It also can self-destruct into tiny pieces if it misses, posing much less risk for other spacecraft.
It gets even funner when you realise ships could effectively be EMP'd by the heat. Their electronics would require copper and gold cables, simply pump enough heat into the ship to melt them and suddenly all of it's systems are down and it's crew is in complete darkness. On the other hand a smart space-ship design would use conductive armor panels to transfer the heat away from any vital components and maybe even use it to power a weapon of sorts. You could also set up systems inside the ship that take all the excess heat and reuse it to power the ship aswell.
You could do that, or you could just use cabels made from graphene. It has a melting point of more than 3.000°C, while copper melts at 1.085°C and gold at 1.064°C. It's also more bendable, doesn't rip as fast and is 1.5 times as conductive when it comes to electricity than Copper, but also 2 times as heat conductive than Copper. So in combination with your idea, this would be perfect. You could use the high conductivity of graphene to power these weapons, engines, or what ever more effective
there's something like this on some ships in Mass Effect lore. It said the panels would glow red hot and provide some psychological effect on pirates and shit.
Some of the best space battles I've read about were in Lost Fleet: Dauntless. Ships are engaging over vast distances inside solar systems, far enough away and moving fast enough to require the targeting systems to take relativity into account. All targeting and detection systems are visual based, as radar would take twice as long for the results to appear due to needing to bounce back. Communications are delayed, often by hours depending on the distance between ships. Momentum and pre-battle positioning is critical for an effective strategy, as orders and maneuvers are always delayed.
Love the addition of EVE ships in this episode and so long awesome space war future. Oh and anyone else remember the Mass Effect commander talking about Isaac Newton?
Something really cool. you would never know the blast was on the way to you... you would never know especially if it was travelling light speed or near light speed. any censer to detect such a thing would have to seek out the projectile or light. then send a signal back to the ship telling the ship there was death on the way. by the time the ship detected said weapon would have hit the ship... so you are boned no matter what
The Expanse. is a great show that actually deals with those kinds of problems head on. They use stuff like laser dazzlers to blind sensors, and observing a battle from long range is delayed by relativistic effects of distance. Star Trek/Wars always have to massively slow down the laser type weapons to make it exciting, or invoke energy shields to mute them. Or, they have sensors to tell when a weapon is being charged up as warning.
That's what time travel is for. "Thank God we got this 1h reset device thingy whenever our ship is completely destroyed, Captain." - "Well said, mate. Mwahahahaha..."
I think a partial solution to this would be to constantly scan the area around yourself for the signs of weaponry powering up or for solid objects. Of course, this doesn't protect you against someone, say, activating a laser outside of the range of your (probably also light-based) sensors, flying into range, and then shooting you...but then they have to figure out where you are as well.
LashknifeTalon his problem was when you are travelling at light speed, there is no way to sense anything in front of you due to your speed. But, to your point. Stealth would work even better in space. You could take an existing weapon, like an already stealth J-Sow, and integrate a paint like vanta-black into the stealth coating. Now you are invisible to not only radar, but laser based sensors, since the paint absorbs +99% of the light that hits it, and the rest would be reflected in a different direction. If you shield the electronics like we do in nuclear weapons. There would be no way to sense the powered up electronics inside. You would have this super black object travelling at you, that absorbs or reflects the EM radiation we use to sense objects now. We would need new and way more advanced sensors, that could sense the very slight change in the local gravitational field by it.
Khaden Allast it wouldn’t matter if it cooks, it only has to last a very short amount of time, from firing to detonation. On a long term mission, you could lob one from earth to mars orbit, powered down on a basic course, only fire up the electronics and engines at random intervals, and go completely dead again until detonation . You would only be generating enough heat to keep the electronics warm, and nothing else. There wouldn’t be need for anything else to be on, and there is no crew to constantly generate waste heat. Gimballed, but shrouded, engines would negate the need for maneuvering thrusters, since it doesn’t have to be a hit-to-kill weapon a general area is good enough trajectory. EM field sensors would have to be centuries ahead of what we can do now. The power of an electric field drops by orders of magnitude as you double the distance. The best sensors we have now, MAD, on maritime patrol craft, can only “see” a 3,000-5,000 ton submarine; if it’s flying within a 50m of the ocean, and if the submarine is within 100m of the surface. Plus, one of the main functions of stealth coatings is to absorb EM radiation, making it an even harder target to distinguish from the background noise.
This is probably my favorite aspect of The Expanse. The story about the alien goo is okay, but I watch it mostly for the well thought out Space battles.
Babylon 5 did a decent job back in the day, even saw a fighter do the same flip-but-still-go-straight-fire-at-tailing-enemy move Kyle's Xwing did. They were still too close, but they avoided the linear naval battles, battles were utter chaos with ships EVERYWHERE in every orientation shooting tons of different kinds of weapons all over the place. Fun, philosophical show. Sounds like I need to start watching The Expanse.
@@RubbishXplane12 The sound in the expanse is just an artistic representation. When characters need to hear in the story in space they need physical contact or transmitters. Don't know about the explosions tho.
@@RubbishXplane12 I've heard that the sounds we hear in space are the sounds that the crew inside the ship would hear - their own guns firing and the impact from getting hit. I also imagine in some fights, like with the mirrors, there's enough emissions from all the ships that there would be some sound travelling through them
There are other ways of cooling down, the trick is to transfer that heat into some mass and then either jettison it or store it in a partially disconnected part of the ship. (Peltier devices are really cool, no really, check it out :P )
starships resurrected explains why some star trek ships have wings, to dump heat, and in star trek you can convert energy (which can be heat) into matter, and in an episode in star trek voyager life support lost power, the ship wasn't cooling down, it was heating
Spinning works. If you're being hit with a laser beam, you don't want it boring into the same place for long enough to actually get through to something vital, so spinning and thus denying your enemy the ability to concentrate fire on a single place long enough to burn through is a valid tactic.
Somewhat, yes, but when spinning you still have a central axis on which you spin, you could just aim there with the laser. Maneuvering around, well if we're using seriously advanced and precise robotics and motors to control that laser, it'll simply follow you, just as simplistic cameras can track your face while you move your head around, cameras in advanced ships can track a single point on that ship with extreme accuracy and since there is no lag with that laser beam, having it follow that focused point would be easy on a moving target. Unless it was extremely erratic, than its a bit more difficult (with todays technology) to accurately predict and track its movement to keep it focused.
Better than spinning would be rotating your entire ship, presenting different sides at a time. But you brought up another good point... SW was based on WWII dogfighting, and automated targeting systems were cutting edge when the movie came out, but given what we know today, there'd be no point whatsoever for the Millennium Falcon to have a manned turret.
Joel V In WWII there were allready remote operated turrets on bombers. By the 70's the CWIS and other fully automated weapons were in development. The US made CWIS entered military use in 1980, with development that lasted long before that. Most writers just don't care enough to research the tech and want to tell a story more than build a world.
Competition Shooting. I imagine the Falcon wasn't designed as a warship, but more of a yacht. Good for racing, doing target shooting runs, and cruising the galaxy. I can see Solo entering a Galactic Triathlon where there is a portion of the race where the co-pilot needs to manually shoot at designated targets along the race track. A manual gun would be useless in real fighting, but maybe a force-sensitive Jedi could use their powers to target like a computer. A good writer would have used that scene to foreshadow Luke's final scene in the trench run.
I think with all those things you said I don't get why we should really fight with ships carrying people , when engagements take place that far away from each other , i think a ship with Humans on board would bei far behinde any "line" of war andere would just control drones with detectors and weaponry from far away. Why risk your live when you can run away and let some robot die for you ?
Drones can be hacked but before being hacked successfully they can be disposed off and then used as debris to take cover. If anything, controlling the battle-field and altering it by artificially adding debris would be more effective than AI controlled drones
I'm pretty sure in a threedimentional space battle where the opponents are that far away debri wouldn't be such an issue. I's not like you could really block anything, any weaponry woud be too fast.
True, but then wouldn't enemies seek out the control sources? Another thing is that while that would work, communication to an unmanned ship wouldn't be fast enough to deal with light speed attacks and such. Of course, neither would a manned ship be able to respond to such fast attacks. So yeah, like I've thought for a decade or so, we should stop sending soldiers out into battles and instead use remotely controlled things (here on Earth too), or use things that are automated. Throwing thousands of men out there to die, leaving behind their loved ones and such, that seems very outdated now that we already have the tech for unmanned warfare.
In general drones can't be hacked - that's just a popular misconception. But you could try to jam their comms (between themselves and their mother ship). But if they already committed to attack - all jamming really achieves is blocking an "abort attack, return to base" command from the mothership :). Besides, drones (essentially unmanned fighters) are kind of silly in space. Missiles/torpedoes make more sense. a fighter needs to be sturdier to loiter around the enemy ship, needs to carry weapons, ammunition and fuel/propellant to maneuver and return to base. Basically a lot of dead weight for something whose sole goal is to hurt the enemy ship.
Among recent "major" sci-fi, Babylon 5 is probably the closest to depicting realistic space battles. Between proper following of physics in movement of spacecraft; use of useful space weaponry (laser cannons that actually fire at the speed of light rather than "slow" like Star Trek phasers,) and use of mass drivers for planetary bombardment, etc. They even use proper tactics in "dogfights".
If your show has FTL, space fighters, visible beam weapons, rotating segments while under thrust, and the ships are less than half fuel tanks, then it isn't realistic. That includes BSG & B5 (which I like) and The Expanse (which I don't).
The Expanse doesn't have reaction mass tanks or radiators on their ships. They also have literally every ship capable of multi-G acceleration but they have weapons other than RKVs and simply pointing your engines at your enemy. It also has stealth in space and close-quarters battles (they literally call it that!). That's not to mention ridiculous stuff like hangar bays for parasite craft and magnetic boots. The Expanse is an ignorant person's idea of what realistic space combat is like.
Star trek phasers is charged plasma, and would move at the speed it was ejected out by a magnetic field. while indeed slower, it could be more dangerous to a ships hull and systems. strong magnetic fields would help in protecting from this kind of weapon
I had hope you would talk about the Expanse ! It's really cool to see them try to be the most realistic possible, taking into account the strong acceleration that the crew has to endure and the fact that propulsion is done in two phases. orientation of the ship is done by smaller "air blasting" holes and propulsion is done afterwards by the main reactor.
Actually Battlestar Galactica got the topic of dogfights right. Exactly the way how you have described (turning to target enemy behind you while still fly the same direction). I'm a little bit disappointed that it was not taken into account :( Amazing show, much more accurate than most in topic of space battles (fun sound effects in space are included, but muted to depict hearing from inside of ship that shoots or is being shot.
I mean realistic space fighter combat is just a lot of dead fighters. Even more if they're manned and you dont have some kind of gee-force dampening science which is probably impossible with current science. The Expanse is pretty realistic tho
@@BigDictator5335 haven't seen the show but not necessarily. When evaluating something as far out as space combat you really have little idea what tech will arise and what hidden engineering challenges you will encounter. Alot of things you can write off or make good guesses, but something like that is too small of a difference to make an educated guess. (oh and I think you mean some kind of ACS system, reaction wheels have no where near enough torque for a space fighter)
I have a friend whose grandfather fought in the Battle of Jutland on the German side. My friend related that his grandfather couldn't see anything, as the visibility was low and enemy (British) ships were too far away, yet he could hear shells wizzing overhead, hitting the water, etc. So it seems that space war would resemble old-school naval battles in some sense!
I think The Expanse did a pretty good job of depicting space war, ships can move in all directions and they use more believable weapons like conventional firearms, torpedoes and rail guns.
Yeah, in Star Wars it makes more sense to be closer and that the plasma projectiles would be slower, but the WW2 dog fighting still wouldn't be a thing.
Kyle Russo the dogfights *do* make sense, although the flight would be very different. With powerful, close range plasma shots would be much better to dodge than to just take it, therefore dogfights.
I was going to point this out. They never say they're using lasers in Star Wars -- they're using "blasters", which (as Casey points out) appear to be firing plasma bolts.
ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-aaOuUP3i_J4.html Here is a pretty awesome space battle that is quite realistic. Sort of got spoilers, but this is episode 4 of season 1, and the first three episodes are mostly just setting the charicters and backdrop for the story.
This is why I love one of the lines I overheard in... I believe it was Mass Effect 2. A few recruits were getting trained by a senior officer and one of the things he mentioned was that firing at something either towards the sky or in space with their rifles or their ship weapons mean that whenever they pull the trigger, even if the round doesn't hit anything in that battle and keeps flying for 10,000 years, it will hit something and then it will royally screw up someone's day. Mass Effect used their techno-magic mass effect fields to miniaturize railguns and I've actually read into all that lore, it is fascinating... the rounds you fire are literally sand-grain sized because they're accelerated like railgun rounds and anything the size of a normal bullet would cause a nuclear explosion. I love sci-fi...
Alien engineer: Finally, after a thousand years, we have finished building our giant spaceship to escape our dying planet! *random photon torpedo hits said escape ship*
While technically true that it might eventually collide with something. It is most likely to run into a gas giant or star if it gets caught in the well of one of those. Also, it would take literally hundreds of thousands of years for it to reach another star system if traveling at modern speeds. That also assumes that it is on an escape vector, not stuck in an orbit.
A bit of space war tactics that I would like to see more on is the Picard Maneuver - the *ACTUAL* Picard Maneuver. Using warp drive to jump around a battlefield so that the enemy sees you in two places at once. I was thinking of how to use this - a single spacecraft could appear to their enemy as firing from multiple places/angles at the same time. Start at 10 seconds prior to "0", 3 million KM from the enemy directly beneath them - fire a laser, then warp to be at their 9 o'clock position, 2.4 million KM away at the 8 second mark. Fire again, warp again. This time to 6 o'clock, 1.8 million KM away, fire at the 6 second mark. Warp to their 3 o'clock, 1.2 million KM away, fire at the 4 second mark. Warp to directly above them 600,000 KM away, fire at the 2 second mark, then directly in front of them at whatever "close enough to see the whites of their eyes" distance you like and fire at the 0 point. They'll be hit from all angles, from what appears to be "you" every time, from different distances, simultaneously. Of course, this only works if they're in "open space" - since even the second-closest point is still double the distance to the moon, so lots of things can get in the way, like planets and moons, and this requires a "ridiculously fast" warp drive system, capable of moving you between the various points really fast, turning the ship toward the enemy, firing, turning the ship to the next location, and starting up the warp drive and moving 600,000 KM again in all less than two seconds.
Most FTL technobabbles do not allow for instantaneous travel at the press of a button, and require a powerup and\or powerdown time. Not mentioning that the further you shot at the enemy the more time he have to change the trajectory and evade your shot.
Also given that in SW TLJ Holdo proved that kinetic impacts can happen while at lightspeed (never done before in SW universe), why has no one ever developed a hyperspace torpedo?
Step 1 Get asteroids Step 2 Fit them with a hyperdrive, Engines, and a computer for the calculations Step 3 ??? Step 4 solve all problems by throwing rocks at it
Joel V I'd like to point out that TLJ literally doesn't know how hyperspace works in their own universe. By Star Wars' own, previously stated, canon laws of that universe, what Holdo did.... was completely impossible. And they only did it because they wanted a cool shot.
"...only did it because they wanted a cool shot." is true of so many movies. Almost every "franchise," once it has more than a single movie, ends up contradicting itself. And Holdo was supposedly not *QUITE* in hyperspace yet, but accelerated up to "just shy of the speed of light" at the time of the impact. Also, why wouldn't it work? "You'll fly too close to a star, or right through a supernova" - implying that you *CAN* crash in to "real universe" objects while in hyperspace.
the depressurization itself would drop the temps in the ship a huge amount. We also saw that ships like the Rocinante had in-wall fluid transport systems (they rigged them to grow plants on the walls in planter boxes). These would be used to manage and move heat, and could be vented in an emergency.
One thing I’ve always thought that if we were to discover a way to go faster than the speed of light or at 99%, the speed of light is still 1000 technologies we would need to master before sending the first ship.
Heat management in space is not nearly as big a deal as you suggest. Yes, it's hard to lose heat through radiation _at temperatures we are familiar with,_ but radiation is much more efficient if you can concentrate the waste-heat into a small, glowing-hot radiator. Heat pumps, aka air conditioners, can do this quite effectively, up to an arbitrarily high temperature on the "hot" side. The reason the ISS doesn't do this is because it lacks the energy supply to run high-powered heat pumps, but a hypothetical space battleship armed with gigawatt lasers would have more than enough power to pump all its waste heat into a set of small, glowing-hot, highly-efficient radiators.
Honest question - doesn't the energy required to operate the heat pumps increase the higher the temperature of the radiator you're trying to push the heat into? If you tried to pump all the waste heat into a teeny-tiny radiator, wouldn't that make the venting system a whole lot less efficient?
The waste heat from the heat pump does get channeled into the radiator, yes. But assuming the heat pump is designed to handle the volume of heat it's burdened with, the heat pump's own waste heat will be a small percentage of the total. A very easy example is an undersized air conditioner, which will run continuously and burn a lot more electricity than an air conditioner properly rated for the room it's cooling.
Active cooling systems could certainly help alleviate the problem of overheating - but the intensity of heat generated by life-or-death combat might well overwhelm such a system, depending on how much energy you have available, and how much of the ship's mass you were willing to sacrifice for cooling systems. High power fusion drives and weapons systems are likely to create a VAST amount of waste heat, so there will likely be very real engineering limitations on how much heat your ships active cooling systems are able to effectively dump, given all the competing demands for engines, power, weapon systems, armor, fuel, and various crew support systems. So really, whether heat is a critical issue in space combat will likely come down to detailed engineering limitations and trade offs, as well as technological efficiency. Given that waste heat is a serious problem for TERRESTRIAL weapons systems, it's likely that those problems will only get considerably harder to deal with in space.
Yes, it is possible to exceed the capacity of the cooling system, but that isn't much of a revelation. It's possible to exceed the capacity of _any_ mechanical device -- it's up to the engineers who would design a spaceship to ensure they don't exceed the capacity of the cooling system even with all other systems running at full-load. As for the amount of energy needed to engage in combat, it's pretty minimal. Given that there are no known methods for generating active shielding on-demand, all you'd have to do is poke one-too-many holes in the enemy spaceship and then just wait for the crew to suffocate. You can do that extremely easily with a simple machine gun, since bullets have an unlimited range in space. And it wouldn't be hard to aim the aforementioned machine gun either, because even though it would take the bullets hours to travel tens of thousands of miles to the enemy target, they would be indistinguishable from background noise on the enemy's radar, so you could fire at the enemy without ever changing course to give away your intentions. The enemy would be surprised by a barrage of armor-piercing bullets with no warning, and that would be the end of the battle.
Firing bullets generates heat - a lot of it. Machine guns on earth are generally air or liquid cooled in order to maintain any substantial rate of fire without overheating and destroying the barrel. In space a kinetic launcher would absolutely require an active cooling system to keep its heat down in manageable ranges - and it would likely generate far more heat in the first place than its terrestrial counterpart, as you need extremely high projectile velocities and volumes to make a hit probable at 1000s of km against an evasive target. The target will be evading because it will almost certainly be able to detect the heat signature of your gun firing in the first place.. Each round you fire from a standard gun literally creates a small fireball of burning gas exhaust in the direction of fire - pretty hard to miss against the cold backdrop of space. Note that electromagnetic launchers like railguns do also generate a great deal of waste heat - not to mention an EM energy spike that might also be detectable by the intended target. If you really want to ambush a target in space, your best bet would probably be to use missiles that accelerate their initial stage with nothing but pressurized gas propulsion - incredibly slow and inefficient, but probably very hard to detect - until they (likely hours or days later), get relatively close to their target and then activate a terminal stage high-power rocket to home in and destroy their target from a fairly short distance. Obviously this tactic only works if the target is essentially stationary or moving on a predictable course for an extended period of time, otherwise your very slow stealth missile will never catch up with them.
I was thinking about this the other day, and came to the same conclusion: heat management is the key. The biggest radiator wins. Ships might carry thermal ballast they could eject/vent. Superconductive (or super-thermally-conductive) coatings could be critical for rapidly conducting heat from laser strikes to places to radiate/store/eject it. And don't forget, every maneuver has the potential to generate engine waste heat that might not all make it out the back.
Part of why I appreciate Gundam. The Universal Century at least gave a reason as to why these ships and mechs would engage in close quarters, and thats due its version of a "god particle," so while it may not be accurate science, it at least makes its own science to make it contextually make sense in universe
Hi there, I have a few points for you. In no particular order: Some of your points I have asked myself. Such as why they don't use all 3 dimensions in a space battle. Spock noted it during the movie battle with Khan, he thinks in 2 dimensions. Evidently this is a far more widespread problem. Some of this is likely due to the controls, even though we here all those 215 mark 12, or whatever to indicate two circles and this demonstrate 3 dimensions, we almost never see them shift to a different plane. As for star wars, we're reasonably certain they are firing plasma rather than lasers otherwise we wouldn't see the light at all. As for movement, you're forgetting the issues with the sci-fi inertial dampeners. If they work as they are explained (generally via a "subspace field" that reduces the effective mass and therefore inertia of an object) then once something left the field or the field shut down it would suddenly slow down as all the mass returned into the equation. The same energy would have to be spread out over the entire ship itself. (So goes my theory.) However, if instead they worked by emitting gravitons to cause the objects within to have a net change in velocity of 0, then losing them suddenly would cause no change until the ship had to change speed or direction. The problem with the second model of inertial dampeners is that it would cause the energy and fuel requirements to go up immensely. Wouldn't it be efficient to recycle the heat energy into energy for the ship? If the weapons could be rewired to use the ship's own heat for supplementary power then the hotter they got, the more powerful the weapons would be. Especially if they are plasma based.
Cruaver VoidDrake interesting proposal, it would change the Trek Vs Star Wars battle SHARPLY in favor of Star Wars across the board in favor heavily against Starfleet
Before I get to the end of the video, because I frickin' love this channel, I have to interject some things about things moving in space. 1: Things don't fly forever in space. Yes, objects in motion TEND TO stay in motion. That means you chuck a rock in space, it goes on and on and on and on. But not forever. That assumes some sort of infinite impelling force, which does not exist in this context. The statements usually made that objects in motion tend to stay in motion without external influence forgets to mention INTERNAL influence. Mass is always relevant, even without gravity. An object's own mass will eventually bring it to a stop, even though it is ALSO what carried it so far. However, because the force it was sent forward at is not constant, neither can the state of motion be constant. The very idea breaks some pretty basic physics principles about infinities. 2: Momentum and inertia are functions of MASS, not gravity. A ship, unless incredibly small and shaped like a sphere, doesn't rotate in a perfect sphere. Any variation of shape beyond perfectly spherical will cause deviations in rotation and direction of travel during rotation, because the mass balance is different. Has nothing to do with gravity. So an X-Wing couldn't just cut engines and spin in a perfect circle to fire back directly back at the chasing attacker. There would be inertial drift, based on the momentum of the mass of the ship. Gravity doesn't even really enter into it, unless you get into the pedantic debate about whether all objects with any mass generate gravity of their own. Basically, if I'm chasing you down, then you cut engine power and try to flip over backwards to be looking at me, a few things are going to happen quickly. First, you're going to drift upwards, as you fling the mass\weight of your butt up to where your face was and try to put your face where your butt was, and slow down a lot, because you cut impelling force, and your rotation, without the aid of strict, skilled, and precise maneuvering thrust control, is going to drift based on the weight\mass balance of your ship and its shape\mass distribution. And lastly, I'm going to blow up your ship because that shit doesn't work like you think it will, rookie :D Annnnd last point: Dodging DOES work, dependent upon distance between target and attacker, rate of travel for both, and the rate of travel for the actual weapons fire. This video is also assuming that the weapons fire is moving at lightspeed, which it is not. I know most sci-fi breaks the FTL thing all the time and Star Wars made it seem simple to do so, but even in the now-cut lore(fuck you, Disney, it's still relevant), the weapons fire is not traveling anywhere near lightspeed. In fact, based on visual observation, most of it moves at speeds more akin to real-world small arms fire(anything from a .22 pistol to an M2 .50 machine-gun) to large arms and missile technology(artillery cannons, cruise missiles, ICBMs, etc), which are very much something you can dodge. Also, consider that visual ranges in space seems to be distorted because of the immense, vast distances and speeds involved. Ok, I'm not going to go into that because I just realized how hard my nerd button just got struck and how hard I just ranted. I'll shut up now. Great video though! Didn't know that bit about lasers in the rain. FUCK!! THAT REMINDS ME! Blasters work in the rain because they are actually firing a physical projectile, but it's wrapped in a field of energy that is plasma based, if my nerdy memory is serving me correctly. Star Wars weapons have magazines, yo! They just hold hundreds of the little projectiles. Mass Effect 1 did something similar, except the numbers were in the thousands. Not sure why they changed it for ME2. Shit like that is why I never finished the series. And heat sinks, man. Duh. You chuck them out the back. HA! THROW THEM OUT FOR EXTRA PROJECTILES :D Beyond that, why wouldn't efficient heat management be a part of basic ship design anyway? Ok. Done, for real this time. /endrant
This gives me the impression that a accurate big space battles would be somewhere between aircraft carriers and submarines fighting each other in terms of tactics.
Fighter, maned ones anyway, would only be a nuisance at best. Can't close the distance quickly enough to engage visual attacks. Then, if you are accelerating towards the target, you get one pass to hit it, then you are out of range, and it would take too long to slow down, turn around, and make a second pass. Maybe while in orbit... hit once, then wait to come around the planet for a second run. Just hoping the target was where you left it.
@@stuartwelch6432 Let me clarify, as I see the error in my wording: Aircraft carriers loaded only with nuclear capable bombers. While the "fighter" ships have guns those will probably be more to shoot down other "fighters"
What a fun and thoughtful video. I'm glad I rediscovered this channel -- used to watch on Pluto TV, but I no longer use that. While _Babylon 5_ also suffers from Naval Battle Syndrome, one of the things I think they got right was the way in which Star Furies and White Stars can maneuver -- specifically, maintaining a particular vector and rotating to perform rearwards shots and various strafing maneuvers It's still dogfighting, but in a spaceshippy way that's far cooler than what can be done with craft that move within fluids.
You forgot the way orbital mechanics would factor in too, and Delta V limits. To effectively fight, you also have to be able to rendezvous. Either via your projectiles, or putting your ships into a complimentary orbit if you want to take multiple shots without having to re-adjust and make new firing solutions. If you're too far, your enemy could easily evade non-relativistic weapons fire by altering their orbit a tiny bit too. Fully real space combat is a complex and tricky beast. Submarine battles are a reasonable facsimile, at least due to how much cat and mouse you would have, and how quickly it would end once the cat gets a good shot in on the mouse. Battles would be decided by Delta V, heat capacity and how a captain and crew used it. Effectively a near 100% strategic battle versus more tactical planet-side engagements. The immense cost and value of large space war-ships would be quite a factor too. The cost to build, even if you can build in space or have an orbital elevator. Having to make these ships capable of long term crew support and interstellar travel. Surviving the rigours of space, and the rigours of combat too. Big radiator arrays are great for dissipating heat, but very, very vulnerable and do not like quick changes in velocity. Armour is protective, but cuts your Delta V. The balancing act would be multi-fold and so deeply faceted I imagine most wouldn't have the patience to even watch it without getting bored. Hence why BS battles.
Tiagorpg mendes You are aware of how spaceflight and orbital mechanics work, right? You can only change your velocity, and thereby alter your orbital path by expelling something. Be it photons, ions or entire atoms (In other words, standard chemical thrusters for the last one.) And you cannot have infinite fuel. Now in spaceflight terms, your fuel is measured in effective change in velocity. Distance isn't really a relevant measure in reality, it doesn't express where you can go in 3d space while in orbit effectively. If you have an effective 500 m/s of DV available, and your enemy 250 m/s, there's zero chance they can force a rendezvous with you. You could change orbital inclination and height of your apoapsis and periapsis until your attacker runs out of disposable DV. Worse, let's say you come from mars to attack earth in a hypothetical hard scifi space battle. You need roughly 1-2 km/s delta V to return home, and in that ballpark to get to earth from mars. If you had fuel reserves that allow for 5km/s of total delta V, you need to reserve about 4 km/s for your round trip if you want to go home. Maybe more, ad a backup. If the earth space force forces you to burn too much fuel, you may be stuck in a scenario where you cannot go home to mars. For example, a chance between a major burn that leaves you unable to return home, or certain death from a KKW of some kind. If you don't evade the kinetic impactor, you die, if you do, you face the fact you need to surrender, since you haven't the fuel to escape earth's gravity and head back to mars. I have seen zero scifi shows ever, ever cover delta V in combat. People often herald "The Expanse" as realistic, but IMO their utter lack of heat management needs and infinite DV put them right into the same class as Star Trek. But worse, because it's bullshit trying to pretend to be real science. The only thing I can think of that touched on DV was PlanetES, but it wasn't exactly a combat-oriented show. And it's Anime, versus western scifi. Outside of documentary style movies and fictional works set in the real present world, DV is always ignored. Because it puts a huge cap on what you can do in combat in space. There was a series someone did using Kerbal space program, involving true to life orbital mechanics in space combat. It effectively shows how boring it would be. As boring as terrestrial war is really, with the long marches and tons of logistics with little real combat, space combat is -days- of manoeuvring and waiting, generally for a handful of shots. And if nothing comes of it, days more of manoeuvring to try and take another at your next window for a rendezvous as your opponent tries to outmanoeuvre you.
@@annoyedchef7124 cause George thought they were cooler sounding. And he's right lol. Turboplasma sounds alright but turbolaser rolls off the tongue imo
I thought it was more a matter of a "marker bolt". As in, the slow-moving and not-damaging bolt that we see travels to target, and after it hits, the laser registers that impact and then fires at c. So you can't dodge the actual laser, but it can't hit you until after the bolt does, and that can be dodged.
It changes a lot. Lasers are easily defeatable with mirrors...so if your opponent uses lasers, you can just coat your ship with a reflective surface and laugh at them.
